Enterprise Piet(leanpub.com)

99 pointsby raganwaldvor 14 Jahren39 comments

https://leanpub.com/piet

15 comments

jpadvovor 14 Jahren

This is hilarious, of course, but it also points to some really interesting languages. Turns out that fungeoid is an actual category of fascinating experimental / toy / joke languages. Obviously Piet is not particularly useful in the real world, but thinking about languages like this has got to be good for a programmer's mind.

For example, try thinking about what kinds of things this language would be useful for. Or if a similar visualization for an existing language would be useful. Unlock your mind and let it roam...

In case you didn't click the link in the article [1], here's part of what Wikipedia has to say:

"A funge is an esoteric programming language which models its programs as metric spaces with coordinate systems (often, but not necessarily, Cartesian) and which execute instructions located at points in their program space by moving an instruction pointer (a position vector which indicates the currently executing instruction) through that space."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funge#Funges

nuclear_eclipsevor 14 Jahren

The most obvious "useful" ability of Piet comes in calculating Pi: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

Of note from the sample program, emphasis mine: "... this amazing program which calculates an approximation of pi literally by dividing a circular area by the radius twice. ... Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program."

regehrvor 14 Jahren

Reminds me of this old obfuscated C contest entry:

http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~manuel/obfuscate/pi.c

jberrymanvor 14 Jahren

I implemented befunge, and one of the challenges is figuring out whether your implementation is buggy or the test program you're using is. Luckily I found that some insane person had written this incredible test suite:

http://users.tkk.fi/~mniemenm/befunge/mycology.html

There's some other amazing stuff there.

richy_richvor 14 Jahren

Whilst testing PowerShell for an employer I write a bf implementation in it. I was stumped for a while when I couldn't get one of the examples from wikipedia to run until I noticed that the code in the wiki article was broken. Correcting the article was probably my greatest contribution to computer science.

raganwaldvor 14 Jahren

Did anyone notice the Brainfuck interpreter written in Piet? The mind re-boggles... Or repurposes it as an Enterprise Workflow DSL

citizenparkervor 14 Jahren

Enterprise Piet? Seems like the OP is just adding more additional features that takes Piet even further away from simplicity.

Ironically, Piet is, an RGB in the land of greyscale PICS. They broke the abstraction layers, mess up logic with implementation, introduce not just different kinds of colors but redundant and irrelevant dark colors and ruined the magic of "everything is an alpha value." Look what a classic two tone Hello World became.)

grauevor 14 Jahren

Nice job riffing on a criticism of Clojure from another of today's threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697874

sturadnidgevor 14 Jahren

The video alone is almost enough to warrant purchase, but does it provide a framework for data analysis of matrix management performance review metrics in global ITIL organisations?

incisionvor 14 Jahren

I'm not sure about your use case, but it has certainly helped us identify new synergies between our verticals while disrupting traditional silos.

peterarmstrongvor 14 Jahren

Enterprise Piet has also produced the rapid deployment of a Leanpub feature, enabling a synergy between books in this genre and books in a more traditional genre.

gagegevor 14 Jahren

That actually made some sense. Get out of here!

jamessunvor 14 Jahren

I don't design enterprise software often, but when I do, I prefer loose neoplastic principles. Stay curious, my friends.

gagegevor 14 Jahren

I'm still waiting for "Malbolge for Small Businesses".

Anyone know when that's coming out?

[deleted]vor 14 Jahren

tsukikagevor 14 Jahren

The forward-thinking architect will, naturally, consider the judicious use of open source software such as https://github.com/sl236/Piet to streamline enterprise development.

Vivtekvor 14 Jahren

Isn't the strict insistence on two-dimensionality a little restrictive?

pendextvor 14 Jahren

I'd like to see a Piet program where the program output was the same as the 'code' for the program itself.

nthitzvor 14 Jahren

http://mamememo.blogspot.com/2009/10/piet-quine.html unfortunately not very aesthetically pleasing. More from the author here: http://yusuke.endoh.usesthis.com/

nandemovor 14 Jahren

His quine relay is impressive:

http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/09/22/uroboros-programming-with...

ygravor 14 Jahren

And the Qlobe: http://mamememo.blogspot.de/2010/09/qlobe.html

[deleted]vor 14 Jahren

raganwaldvor 14 Jahren

I'll add that as a sample program in the appendix.

minimaxvor 14 Jahren

Ruby had blocks way before Piet even existed. Welcome to the 1990s.

davidwvor 14 Jahren

I heard that the latest version of Mentifex will be written in Piet.

jiryvor 14 Jahren

My enterprise document approval workflow management software has never looked so beautiful. Thank you Enterprise Piet!

cmkrnlvor 14 Jahren

What about Oracle database connectivity? Does this implementation come with drivers?

raganwaldvor 14 Jahren

Thanks for the feedback. I will be adding a section about two-dimensional query optimization in PL/SQL. I have to finish my work on animation using the Broadway Boogie Woogie framework first.

cmkrnlvor 14 Jahren

Thank you for your response.

3825vor 14 Jahren

>Piet programs are represented by a patented and revolutionary arrangement of codels

Since when is being patented a virtue in programming language design?

raganwaldvor 14 Jahren

You don't buy a lot of software by the seat and/or CPU, do you?

;-)

3825vor 14 Jahren

You are correct. I am pretty much never involved in purchasing/acquisition details. I just tell managers I need some particular software and they go and do some voodoo and come back to say yes or no

steverbvor 14 Jahren

As a color-blind developer I find this unnerving.

nthitzvor 14 Jahren

This is a joke right?

raganwaldvor 14 Jahren

I'd normally say "yes, absolutely," but then again, "compared to what?"

Have to seen what passes for Enterprise Software Development tools? Netron Fusion uses Bassett Frame Technology to factor COBOL programs using techniques originally devised for representing knowledge ontologies in LISP-based AI systems.

COBOL + Lisp = $$$.

nahnamevor 14 Jahren

It shouldn't be this hard to figure out. Software development, what have we done?

masklinnvor 14 Jahren

> It shouldn't be this hard to figure out.

I don't know, MUMPS is used in production systems...

absconditusvor 14 Jahren

The M language is quite dated, but arrays in MUMPS are somewhat interesting.

"Arrays: are created dynamically, stored as B-trees, are sparse (i.e. use almost no space for missing nodes), can use any number of subscripts, and subscripts can be strings or numeric (including floating point). Arrays are always automatically stored in sorted order, so there is never any occasion to sort, pack, reorder, or otherwise reorganize the database. Built in functions such as $DATA, $ORDER, $NEXT(deprecated) and $QUERY functions provide efficient examination and traversal of the fundamental array structure, on disk or in memory.

Local arrays: variable names not beginning with caret (i.e. "^") are stored in memory by process, are private to the creating process, expire when the creating process terminates. The available storage depends on implementation. For those implementations using partitions, it is limited to the partition size, (A small patition might be 32K). For other implementations, it may be several megabytes.

Global arrays: ^abc, ^def. These are stored on disk, are available to all processes, and are persistent when the creating process terminates. Very large globals (e.g., hundreds of gigabytes) are practical and efficient in most implementations. This is MUMPS' main "database" mechanism. It is used instead of calling on the operating system to create, write, and read files."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS#Summary_of_key_language_f...

gooberdlxvor 14 Jahren

Interestingly enough, while during my BS CS undergrad stint (1999-2002), I learned both Ada95 and MUMPS (along with Java, Scheme, Lisp of course)...

Kevin O'Kane was teaching MUMPS because (at the time) he had one of the only MUMPS compilers out there (translation to C++ and then compiled down)... Did a lot of work in textual indexing and searching (both medical data and genomics).

http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/mumps.html

I really miss the B-Tree arrays...

quinkvor 14 Jahren

> MUMPS

It might be a punchline, but I'm writing code in it right now.

ianmcgowanvor 14 Jahren

and I, for my sins, am writing some Pick Basic

http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BasicSource